All I Wanted for Christmas Was ...

Into the Silence
Wade Davis

A few days before Christmas, I was heading up to the MoFo listening, as is my habit, to CBC Radio One.  I had tuned into the evening current affairs program and as luck would have it, they had decided to play a repeat of an interview done with Wade Davis -- author, anthropologist, photographer, and ethnobotantist.  I wasn't listening for five minutes before I decided that I wanted ... no, I needed to read this book.

Into the Silence -- the Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest can be found in the history section of your local bookstore/library.  Not surprisingly, the book is exactly what the title says it is.  It is also so much more.  In telling the story of Britain's first three attempts on Chomolungma, Into the Silence is history, biography, and a page-turning thriller all rolled up into one well-researched volume.  I could not put this book down and at 573 pages of actual text (I only skimmed the annotated bibliography which would have added a bunch more), the fact that it took less than a week to read while working more than full time says a lot.

What I found the most fascinating was the care with which Davis developed the characters.  While Mallory is indeed a major player in Everest story, the book focuses on the psychology of a generation impacted by the devastation of WWI.  Understanding why these men were pursuing the mountain was a more important question to the author than whether or not Mallory and/or Irvine made the summit.  If you have any interest at all in Everest, war poetry, the Edwardian sensibility, or British colonialism, I highly recommend that you read this book.  Even if you're not interested in any of those subjects, I guarantee that you will be by the end of the read.  Pick this one up and you won't regret it.

DES